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FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

John Kerry Looks At The Bright Side Of The Recession

When you’re rich, really eight-figure inherited/married wealth rich, a recession means you might opt for the pre-owned Gulfstream IV over the new. If only to let the little people know that you feel their pain.

When you’re poor, bad times threaten your job, your family, your health, or your life. Bad times hurt people at the margins.

The liberal ruling class displays an astonishingly callous disregard of the human cost of bad economic times on the huddled masses whose interests they claim to safeguard.

But even the most clueless patrician among our elected elite would never suggest that a recession is a good thing.

Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent. [emphasis added]

So it’s the nebulous value of a speculative decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured as a change in concentration of a few parts per million, versus the tangible certainty of human hunger, pain and privation for millions of Americans.

What did Kerry just unwittingly admit? He admitted that cap-and-trade advocates and like-minded global warming believers see economic prosperity as a huge source of the supposed problem. That’s why they’re proposing the perfect solution – from their perspective – in the form of a massive tax increase directly on industry.

Nothing discourages productive economic activity like confiscatory taxes on said activity. The same people who lament the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States now seek to multiply these losses many times over by making it economically impossible for manufacturers to operate. …

But the recession, hey, that’s working like a dream. Carbon emissions are down 6 percent. Damn. How many more big industrial conglomerates do we have to put out of business to get to 20 percent?